Lapierre quickest in practice 2
Team France returned to the top of the timesheets in the second free practice session for this weekend's A1 Grand Prix championship finale in China
Times continued to tumble as grip increased on the very wide Shanghai track and Nicolas Lapierre lapped the 5.45km circuit more than half a second quicker than Salvador Duran's session-topping time from this morning.
Lapierre is sharing the car with teammate Alex Premat this weekend, and completed both practice sessions today. Premat will drive the car in tomorrow's free practice session and qualifying and will drive the Sprint race. Lapierre will take the car back for the Feature race.
"So far so good," said Lapierre. "It has been a difficult day and we've had to work hard to get the lap time, but tomorrow we will see how Alex gets on."
Lapierre's time was only fractionally quicker than the next best, which was taken by Darren Manning in his debut in the Team Great British car.
The Yorkshireman impressed in his first laps in the 550bhp A1 Grand Prix car, lapping only 0.107 seconds slower than the newly crowned champions.
Duran continued his impressive pace from the morning warm-up session with the third quickest time, ahead of Ryan Briscoe's Team Australia car.
Alex Yoong was fifth quickest ahead of Michael Devaney, in his third race of the season for the Irish team.
"We lost a bit of track time with the car in the garage in first practice, but we still managed to get quite a lot of work done and I know where I need to improve," Devaney said.
"It was hard to get a quick lap in the end because of my lack of confidence with the brakes, so it was not ideal. There's more to come tomorrow."
Pos Driver Team Time Laps 1. Nicolas Lapierre France 1:51.972 19 2. Darren Manning Great Britain 1:52.079 + 0.107 19 3. Salvador Duran Mexico 1:52.321 + 0.349 21 4. Ryan Briscoe Australia 1:52.355 + 0.383 19 5. Alex Yoong Malaysia 1:52.371 + 0.399 21 6. Michael Devaney Ireland 1:52.376 + 0.404 19 7. Patrick Carpentier Canada 1:52.388 + 0.416 22 8. Tengyi Jiang China 1:52.436 + 0.464 23 9. Stephen Simpson South Africa 1:52.477 + 0.505 16 10. Ananda Mikola Indonesia 1:52.701 + 0.729 20 11. Matt Halliday New Zealand 1:52.703 + 0.731 19 12. Jos Verstappen Netherlands 1:52.858 + 0.886 19 13. Tomas Enge Czech Republic 1:52.960 + 0.988 23 14. Enrico Toccacelo Italy 1:53.052 + 1.080 22 15. Giorgio Mondini Switzerland 1:53.066 + 1.094 19 16. Adam Khan Pakistan 1:53.200 + 1.228 16 17. Cesar Campanico Portugal 1:53.423 + 1.451 23 18. Philip Giebler Usa 1:53.564 + 1.592 20 19. Mathias Lauda Austria 1:53.918 + 1.946 24 20. Graham Rahal Lebanon 1:53.951 + 1.979 22 21. Christian Fittipaldi Brazil 1:54.073 + 2.101 15 22. Sebastian Stahl Germany 1:56.172 + 4.200 20
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